Currently, with the application of computer and network is increasingly widespread and business types of the different fields are increasingly enriched, cloud computing environments become more and more widespread and important. Usually, there exist a mass of offline virtual machine mirror images (or virtual machine templates) in the cloud computing environment, and thus upgrading (i.e. patching) the offline virtual machine mirror images (or virtual machine templates) is extremely essential.
In the existing technical solutions, the upgrade for the offline virtual machine mirror images is usually performed in the following two ways: (1) the virtual machines are upgraded online after they are generated by users; and (2) an upgrade script is injected into the virtual machine mirror images, subsequently when a virtual machines are generated based on the virtual machine mirror images, the generated virtual machines would automatically execute the upgrade script for online upgrading.
However, the existing technical solutions have the following problems: whether the upgrade operation having be executed cannot be assured, and the upgrade will take a long time, thereby causing the upgrade is less efficient.
Therefore, there exists the following requirement: to provide a method for offline upgrading the virtual machine mirror image which has higher upgrade efficiency.